Where they differ at first sight, a fresh study of the whole evidence affecting the variation in question is secured. Often the fresh facts which it brings to light will shew the discordance between the new and the old evidence to have been too hastily assumed. Sometimes on the other hand they will confirm it, and then the doubt must remain.
42. To what extent documentary authority alone may be trusted, where the Internal Evidence of Readings is altogether uncertain, must vary in different instances. The predominantly purer text of one document may undoubtedly contain some wrong readings from which the predominantly less pure text of another is free. But the instances of this kind which are ultimately found to stand scrutiny are always much fewer than a critic’s first impression leads him to suppose; and in a text of any length we believe that only a plurality of strong instances confirming each other after close examination ought to disturb the presumption in favour of the document found to be habitually the better. Sometimes of course the superiority may be so slight or obscure that the documentary authority loses its normal weight. In such cases Internal Evidence of Readings becomes of greater relative importance: but as its inherent precariousness remains undiminished, the total result is comparative uncertainty of text.
43. Both the single and the triple processes which we have described depend ultimately on judgements upon Internal Evidence of Readings; but the difference between isolated judgements and combined judgements is vital. In the one case any misapprehension of the immediate evidence, that is, of a single group of individual phenomena, tells in full force upon the solitary process by which one reading is selected from the rest for adop-
